The Photograph Read Online Free Page B

that stands in a tree-lined street of detached homes with small gardens: a 1930s development, the prewar extension of the southern English city that can now be seen—pull back further yet, up into the ultimate dispassionate eye, the sky itself. And there is the city, there is the accretion of stone, brick, wood, glass, and metal. There is the cathedral, riding high amid the central jumble. There are the ravines of roads, the encircling discipline of chimneyed terraces, a belt of parkland, the white cliffs of office blocks, and on the outskirts the neat geometry of the university at which Glyn is employed.
    No people here; the insect-crawl of cars. Glyn’s house is lost now, digested into the urban mass, a tiny box in a row of similar boxes. And the mass itself, the inscrutable complex muddle, bleeds away at its edges, getting sparser and sparser until it is lapped entirely by space. Or rather, by spaces—squares and triangles and rectangles and oblongs and distorted versions of such shapes, edged sometimes with dark ridges. Dark spongy masses, long pale lines slicing away into the distance. Here and there a miniature version of the city density, a little concentration of energy at the confluence of lines. And then eventually space gives way—there is spillage, seepage, a burgeoning unrest that condenses once more into city format: the enigmatic fusion of now and then, everything happening at once.
    If you know what you are looking at, that is. If you are Glyn Peters, who has got up now from his computer and is pulling out the wide shallow drawers of a cabinet. He finds what he wants—a map and a large aerial photograph. He spreads the two on top, side by side, pores over the aerial spread, seeing not space and shape but an assemblage of time. He sees centuries juxtaposed, superimposed, carving each other up, pushing one another out of the way. He sees the labor of medieval peasants etched beneath the rigorous lines of eighteenth-century enclosure; he sees a motorway slammed across a Roman road; he sees the green mound of a Norman castle thrusting up from the clutter of a city center.
    He sees himself, staking out private territorial claims. Been there, done that. There is Bishops Munby, where he spent the summer of 1976, supervising the excavation of a lost medieval village. He can see that field still, with its eloquent lumps and bumps and declivities, its record of the little buildings that had been here, the village street, the string of fishponds. Days of sun, days of rain, the wandering inquisitive cattle, the makeshift canteen in a tent. The evenings in the local pub, the jolly student-labor force. He sees the girl from Durham, Hannah someone, young lecturer, with whom there had been a mutually satisfactory arrangement over that time: frayed denim shorts and long brown legs, glinting a conspiratorial smile as she trowels away at a wall.
    He is down there ten years later, amidst that industrial conurbation, matching street patterns against the early survey maps. Solitary work, the place eddying around him, people casting a glance at the man with his clipboard and knapsack who prowls to and fro. A time of furious application, with his big book in the pipeline, his head buzzing with projects. And Kath’s voice comes in here, rising off the glossy surface at which he is staring, which is overlaid now by that rank-smelling hotel in which he used to stay, Kath’s voice on the phone: “I’m off to France for a couple of weeks with some people, since you don’t seem to be around this summer.” A pause. “Do you love me?” she says. He is writing up his notes in his hotel room: and there is Kath, a hundred and fifty miles away. She is reverberating still. But he hears only her; he himself is extinguished. What did he say to her? Goodness knows.
    He looks up from the spread photograph and stares out of the window, struck by this. Odd. All that swilling speech in the head comes from others, never from oneself. It is